A hand-operated sprayer serves to dispense a specific volume of liquid content stored in a container per pumping operation. Such hand-operated sprayers are often applied to containers that store liquid content such as bath products or insect repellants.
Particularly, small hand-operated sprayers are widely used for cosmetic or perfume containers since the hand-operated sprayer allows liquid content stored in the container to be easily sprayed out in units of small volumes, and relevant technologies have been steadily developed.
A conventional small hand-operated sprayer mainly includes a main body forming an exterior of the sprayer, a pump for pumping content through up-and-down movement of a button inside the main body, the button including a spray nozzle formed therein and being mounted on the top of the pump, and a trigger having one side at which a front end portion of the button is exposed, the trigger being coupled to the main body such that a handle of the trigger can be pulled.
However, this conventional small hand-operated sprayer can be problematic in that content is dispensed as soon as the trigger is depressed. That is, when the trigger is unintentionally depressed since the user drops the sprayer or since unintentional external force is applied to the trigger, the sprayer is immediately activated to discharge content.
To prevent such an unintentional activation of the sprayer, a cap may be attached to the nozzle of the sprayer. However, this requires an additional troublesome process of removing and replacing the cap when the sprayer is used. In addition, the cap is easily lost.
To overcome these problems, the cap may be integrally mounted on the nozzle. However, when the sprayer is activated after the cap is detached, the cap may obstruct spraying since the cap is located near the nozzle.
Although small hand-operated sprayers having various structures have been developed to overcome such problems, there is currently no practical small hand-operated sprayer that provides satisfactory results.